Lady Superior (8 page)

Bernice coughed a laugh. “Nah, guess not. Anyway, there’s gotta be something in all of his awful books that sounds good. Nothing matters but the name. Bad costume? We can change it. Bad story? Doesn’t matter. You pick what you want and we ask him to give us the name.”

“You think he’ll just hand it over? If he’s been doing this for years…”

“He’s been doing this for years, and he’s broke as a joke. We’ll give him a cut.” Bernice swiveled in her chair to face Kristen fully. “Look, they’ve been riding this local-girl thing the whole time. Maiden Milwaukee, all of that. You can actually do what this guy’s been trying to do. Everybody in town will line up to buy your comic just because it’s about you. And if it’s good, people from every town will want it. We keep running with the local-girl thing. We find a decent writer here in town. Artists, too. They’ll eat it up.”

Suddenly drawn to them, Kristen’s gaze drifted to the scantily clad super-women on Bernice’s bulletin board. Women with deep cleavage, leggy in their miniskirts, come-hither eyes beckoning the viewer into the bedroom. All had immaculate hair and battle damage only in places where a ripped costume would reveal more supple skin. Kristen tried to recall an old conversation with Bernice.

When a little girl comes into my shop and can find something they can identify with, I love that. But when I'm by myself and want to chill out, all I want is badass chicks in lingerie.

Was that what it was all about? Kristen wondered. While she didn’t wear lingerie, form-fitting clothes on her figure was close enough. It had certainly gotten Joel’s attention. And Jane’s boss—whoever he was—had decided to release footage from Temple, placing her right in front of everyone’s eyes. Was she their mascot because she was fighting for the right thing, or because she had the right appeal?

What had she actually done? She’d made a few token appearances and handled situations the authorities could have managed without her. Her alter ego had garnered overnight fame for nothing. Now, Bernice was talking merchandising and monetizing. Was it possible to be an instant sell-out? Merchandising didn’t seem heroic. Then again, she’d never read a comic where the hero’s likeness was being stolen in a shady licensing scheme. Stolen-likeness plots were usually more sinister.

Kristen could swear she felt a physical click in her mind.

They’re changelings, Kris. Not werewolves. Their blood can assimilate the blood of other living things. When that happens, they can take the form of anything they’ve assimilated.

She put a hand to her stomach.

Bernice cocked her head, eyes narrow. “If you’re going to throw up, don’t aim for the merchandise, okay?”

Kristen ran from the office, her words a jumble as she tried to get them all out at once. “Gotta make a phone call, will be back later, everything’s fine, don’t worry, bye!”

The moment Kristen burst through the Employees Only door into the store proper, she forced herself to walk. She felt the strength in her gut, and with her sudden tension, she couldn’t find the speed setting between walk and
I belong on a highway
. Jack opened his mouth to say something, but she held up a hand to silence him.

Outside, she jumped into the sedan and popped the glovebox, plucking the phone Jane had given her from its posh depths. She dialed as fast as her fingers would move. Jane answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Hey. It’s Kris.”

“Hey!”

“...hey? I think we did that part already.”

“How’re you feeling? Ready to talk?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Chapter 5

“You'll keep an eye out? That's it?” Kristen's voice grew louder. “Are you serious? You don't have anything else you can say?”

“Hey, keep it down a bit, alright?” Jane flipped a burger. “I know you're freaked out. You have that right. But there isn't a lot we can do right now.”

They'd gathered in a public park and claimed a picnic table. Jane hadn't wasted any time setting up a grill and stoking charcoal. How she'd managed to bring along a full-size grill and a cooler on a Harley, Kristen could only guess. Though the park was full—families with their children out in force on a warm summer day—everyone gave them a wide berth. Smoke from the grill kept them at bay as if they were mosquitoes.

Kristen slammed an open palm on the picnic table. “You’re acting like this is no big deal. Something could be wearing my face. That’s messed up!”

Jane stooped over and reached into the cooler. She tossed a bottle of water to Kristen, who caught it with ease, then pulled out a pack of bacon. Tearing it open, she slapped a few thick slices on the grill with a sizzle. She pushed her sunglasses up onto her head to avoid dirtying them with popping grease. “That’s not how it is. I know it’s a big deal. In fact, it’s a serious problem, but not one we can fix right now. I know Milwaukee isn’t LA or Shanghai, but it’s still a city. If one of the Sea People can become you—and we’re not sure anyone survived that warehouse—we won’t know until they turn up. Taking faces is what they do. They could be anyone. Even if every single person I know was walking the streets looking for them, we wouldn’t find them. But when they show up, we’ll deal with it. I promise.”

“Yeah, like that’ll help. I’ve already been on the news three times. If someone else starts screwing around with my face, that’ll be on the news, too. What if they kill someone? I’m a nerd, I watch TV. I know how this stuff works.”

Jane flipped the other burger. “Then we’ll make sure you’re the one who deals with the imposter. We’ll make sure there’s footage, and we’ll make sure that makes the news, too. Why don’t we talk about something we can actually resolve?”

“Like what?” Kristen snapped.

“Whether or not you’re going to work with us.”

“If you want me on board, a good first step is telling me who you are.” Kristen waved her water bottle as she spoke. “And don’t tell me you already told me. I know your name is Jane and you work for Temple. I’m not even sure if I believe your name is actually Jane. Let me guess—your last name is Doe?”

Jane took a Ziploc bag of sliced cheddar from her cooler and laid slices on the browning burgers. “Miller, actually. Let me start by saying I’m sorry. You’re right, our intro wasn’t the best, but it never is. Temple has been doing what it does for a long time, and there’s still no accepted method of making first contact with someone. There’s no good way to do it. When you tell someone you know they’re gifted—gifted the way you’re gifted—it scares them. It makes them feel backed into a corner.”

Kristen threw her arms out with the bottle still in-hand. “Well, yeah. You literally backed me into a corner.”

“Because if it’s going to happen anyway, you might as well do it. When you’re in a corner, you’re going to throw punches, but at least you can’t go anywhere. You’ll listen to what we have to say. There are more friendly methods, but they tend to be worse in the end.”

“Worse how?”

“Let’s pretend I’d made first contact with you in a bar. I introduced myself, we hung out, we became good friends. After a month or two, when you started to trust me, I’d tell you what I actually wanted. That’s one hell of a betrayal. It’s cruel.”

Kristen rolled her bottle in her hands, elbows on the table. “Okay. Fair enough.”

Jane plated the hamburgers on paper plates and set one before Kristen. She sat on the bench across from her. “And it isn’t uncommon for someone to stay in denial their whole lives. Our culture trains us so thoroughly to believe that this kind of thing can’t exist that even when we see it, we deny it. If you feel like this is all a dream, or you’re the star of a modern
Truman Show
, you aren’t alone. But the choice is simple: accept it and use your gift, or deny it and live without it.”

Kristen took solace in that: she wasn’t alone in the dream. Still, she shook her head. “It really isn’t that simple.”

“It is, though. Do or don’t. If you can’t shake the feeling it’s a dream, maybe walking away is the best thing for you. If you can get over it, then you can do this.”

She picked up her burger, but didn’t take a bite. “That isn’t the biggest hurdle here. You’re asking me to work for people I don’t know anything about. A bank? Seriously? Is this some kind of shadow government agency thing?”

Jane shook her head. “Not at all. When my boss hired me, he put it like this: governments don’t last long enough to do what we do. We deal with long-term issues. I mean seriously long-term. Temple, in its current form, has been doing what it does since the Crusades. This is going to sound absurd, but it’s true: the longest-lasting continuous government in the world is the United States of America. The USA is less than two hundred and fifty years old. When dealing with delicate issues that require global reach, governments just aren’t up to the task. More, the unfortunate truth is that in our world, wealth is the ultimate power. Money alone can’t solve all problems, but I guarantee that money helps grease the wheels. The moneylender is the most powerful person in the world. It’s always been that way.”

Kristen finally took a bite of her burger and spoke with a full mouth. “But what does Temple actually do? Besides the bank stuff.”

“Put simply? We protect people.” Jane reached across the table and moved Kristen’s plate aside. So many names and symbols had been carved onto that table's weathered surface over the years, it was impossible to make sense of any but one. Jane tapped a finger on a single carving: a Venn diagram with three circles, its overlapping parts forming a flower with three thin petals. “See this here? This is the same table Michael used when he brought me into the fold. He put that there. That’s how he sees our existence. Not one world, but three.”

Kristen looked down at the carving, mouth lopsided with skepticism. Had Jane actually planned this down to the table? “Explain.”

Jane tapped the top circle. “This is the world everyone considers normal. Almost everyone you know belongs to that one. Hell, I belong to that one. There’s nothing special about me other than my knowledge.”

She tapped the other two circles, one after the other. “The next one is the world of the gifted. That’s people like you. The third one…that’s something else.”

“Something else?”

“Will you let me get away with saying you won’t have to deal with that one, and if you ever do, I’ll make sure you’re prepared?”

Kristen grumbled. “For now, I guess.”

“The three worlds all bump into each other. Slowly, they’re merging. Temple, and organizations like Temple across the globe, stand in the middle, where all three overlap.” She tapped the center of the diagram. “We protect them from each other. We learn about them. We prevent one from swallowing the others. Yes, sometimes that means doing shady things where we’re doing a lot of sneaking around and lying, but it’s always for good reason.”

“So you’re what, my handler? Is that your job? Make contact, recruit people?”

Jane shook her head. “No. Frankly, I have no idea why my boss makes me do this. I’m a…relic hunter, we’ll say. My specialty is items. Artifacts. Treasures. Not for their cash value, but for preservation, and sometimes protection. You said you’re a nerd, so I’m sure you’re well-acquainted with magical swords.”

“There are actual magical swords?”

Jane cursed to herself silently before saying, “Yeah. That’s the third circle.”

“So you’re some kind of urban Indiana Jones.”

“Not always urban, not always that exciting. I spend a lot of time at garage sales.”

“Garage sales?” Kristen raised an eyebrow. “You find magical artifacts at garage sales?”

“Most people don’t think things like that exist. Hell, most people don’t even know anything about normal history. An original copy of the Declaration of Independence exchanged hands at a flea market with neither party knowing what it was. The personal effects of Roman emperors have been thrown in the trash by people who thought they were old Halloween costumes. At this point, you’re more likely to find ancient artifacts at yard sales than in tombs.”

Kristen’s eyes roamed over the diagram on the table. The symbol formed where the circles overlapped seemed familiar, though she couldn’t place it. She shrugged. “I guess that brings us to the ring.”

Jane winced. “Yeah, not my finest hour. I knew it wasn’t Egyptian, but I was completely confident it was just jewelry. Nothing special about it. We donated it to the museum. But the Sea People want it, so there must be something there.”

“So you have no idea what it actually is?”

“I have a theory.”

“Which is?”

Jane wolfed down a bite of her burger. “Bear with me, I have a bad habit of going overboard when talking history.”

Kristen shrugged and tore a chunk from her hamburger. She tossed it into her mouth as a way of saying proceed.

Leaning against the table, Jane spoke with animated hands. “It’s been said that the only thing you can’t change is the past. While that’s true, too many people think the past means the same thing as history. History is just our understanding of the past. It changes constantly. In this grand puzzle that is history, there are always fuzzy details we force into place.

Say we find something that looks vaguely like ancient Egyptian jewelry. It doesn’t look quite right and we didn’t find it anywhere near Egypt, but Egyptian jewelry from that period is the closest thing to it that fits the timeframe. We either push it aside until there’s more evidence, or we just decide it’s Egyptian, because it can’t be anything else. Within Temple, and organizations like Temple, there’s a theory: there are puzzle pieces that don’t fit because someone gave us a new puzzle halfway through.”

Kristen shook her head. “Too many puzzle metaphors. You lost me.”

Jane paused, performed a mental rewind, and then began anew. “Right. Forget the metaphors for now. Ancient writings describe lands we’ve long assumed were mythical: Hyperborea, Thule, Shambhala, Shangri-La, Buyan, Lemuria. The list goes on. What if they weren’t mythical?”

“So what, they all sank or something?”

“Okay. We know all about plate tectonics. Plate tectonics are the reason the continents look the way they do. But what if that wasn’t the only force at work? What if there was something capable of rearranging vast swaths of land or speeding up the process of tectonic drift? What if these artifacts are in the wrong place because the actual land they occupy came from somewhere else? What if human migration wasn’t just a result of humans picking up and moving, but rather the land itself picking up and moving? Carrying people from Africa to the Americas, or out into the Pacific?”